Strikes me that the anxiety about digitally mediated communication that is explained as “someone just being able to switch off the conversation at any time” is a dissimulation of a truth of what is appealed to as liberal discourse when said discourse happens in physical proximity (i.e. as dialogue, or conversation). What I mean is, worrying that people can control online discourse and end conversations if they don’t like them is really a worry about who has access to behaviours which express power in discourse. Because in online spaces, (often only temporarily, mind) voices can exist in equal magnitude, or volume. The sound metaphor makes more sense I think.

Politicians, for example, have always committed a rhetorical “switching off” of engagement in sanctioned speech whenever they don’t want to answer a question. It is mocked sometimes, perhaps ridiculed or laughed at. But it’s still, arguably, accepted, and still performs a similar social role to the closing of a chat window. Insert your favourite example: Men talk over women – it is sanctioned by whatever can be squeezed under the umbrella of rational debate. If it happens the other way round the woman is labelled otherwise (“You’re an agitator! A feminazi! Bossy! Nasty!”) Managers ignore the voices of workers, because in their ears the obvious pulse of capital keeps going. It comes down to what you choose to label as noise. I know none of this is new, I’m just saying it again, I was thinking it all again just now – ways of thinking never complete though do they?? they have to keep-

I’d suggest that the notion that technologies of digital mediation create novel conditions for denying discourse, that lots of people are readily using their positions online to create spaces which are hermetically sealed from conflict, opposing views etc is an argument used to fog up the actual conditions of discourse in the liberal state. It’s not like any online space is a playground of joyful agreement, even those which are supposed ideologically homogeneous. And anyway, people looking to find a form of political/ideological agreement in their everyday encounters is hardly a new thing – you do it every fucking day and always did, especially in physical/material/this person in front of me ways. If you don’t like what somebody’s saying and you’re more powerful or privileged, it is in fact very easy to find ways of silencing those people, either literally or by questioning the validity of their speech. And this especially in ssspoken disccourssse! The notion that a prelapsarian world of well-informed citizens and equal and honest debate existed “before the Internet came along” is not only a laughable idea but a dangerous one, because it is used to implicitly validate the silencing of voices (“Don’t listen to anything you read online”; the obstructions and insults directed at any proponent of third wave feminism; “discourse online is uncivil”; online communities are weird; “you can’t have friends you’ve never met in person that’s weird”; “we need to have a proper face-to-face conversation about this” etc etc – – I know Iknow there are problems with this position as a total one, we have to have to challenge the voice which does violence, I’m not trying to suggest some hierarchy of communicative practices. Quite the opposite.)

Modes of digital mediation shows Caliban his face in the mirror –(on the fourth draft read though I feel weird about this loaded/clichéd image but don’t want to take it out for fear of disturbing the sound of the whole thing) -anyway anway- digital mediation shows calibanhisfaceinthemirror by granting some measure of equality (in a micro sense, facebook messenger is not communism) in the control of the on/off status of discourse, the ability to sanction or reject speech, to those who would be otherwise marginalised. When this new (albeit limited) power is lived, performed or acted upon by those in a less powerful position, it upsets those who are better able to perform the physical, spoken on/off discourse. (See: the gendered reaction to a woman opening up challenging or radical positions on Twitter) So the claim starts off that digitally mediated discourse is somehow invalid discourse, because of the uncertainty involved in communication, that lots of people involved in discourse have some ability to perform speech with an equal voice which makes it… cacophonous. Or it goes further, and the very idea of its invalidity is used to further justify a mediated silencing (deleting comments or posts) or what might be called switching-off behaviours (derailing arguments/abuse/long comments designed to finalize and make certain i.e. to indicate by magnitude what kind of speech matters or is allowed).

Aside, can it be said that cacophony exists to be critically thought through or with? All readings are cacophony until they are quieted. When and where do you choose to plug your ears and does your body allow you to plug your ears? Good for you.

The latest example of the naked attempt by power to silence, Trump’s banning of selected news organisations from the White House press briefing, could be read in the context of the above. It is a grab for the power-over-discourse where it can still be unambiguously enacted: a physical location.

If somebody is uncomfortable with the ambiguity of discourse on the internet, or looks to establish a particular form of order on a particular form of mediated speech, it is not due to the novel conditions of speech allowed by those digital technologies. It is due to the person who desires to sanction or silence the speech of others – others whose equality with their voice disturbs them.

I can… click away from a friend’s blog, without the price that must be paid for physically turning away from a face-to-face conversation.

This quote is from Shannon Vallor’s work on social networking and ethics (see Social Networking Technology and the Virtues, Ethics and Information Technology, 12 (2): 157-70 . Vallor has written the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for this subject – http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-social-networking/). Charles Ess refers to it in Digital Media Ethics (2014), which is a textbook I’ve been reading the last couple of days. The context is a discussion of how virtue ethics provides a relevant ethical framework for thinking about moral actions in digitally-mediated encounters. It’s got me thinking about the click as a mechanism, but also as a symbol. It is one of the concepts which works as a shorthand for activity online, and as such deserves a bit of deconstruction.

The “click” is constantly referred to in works which ask what the ethical significance of digital interaction is. There is a sense in the reference to the “click” that online activity is bounded by it, defined by it, and that to “click” is often a careless, or ethically weightless, action. To privilege the ‘click’ in descriptions of the ethics of online activity I think does two things. Firstly, it establishes a digital dualism, the notion that online or immaterial activity is experientially and morally separate from offline or material activity. In emphasizing this particular interface effect (we need to click to work the ubiquitous interface of the computer operating system) the ethical discussion focuses not on the relational nature of the encounter between a user and the interface, but only on the mechanism which allows us to navigate it. In reality, online activity has become extremely complex, and is not easily disentangled from the rest of lived experience; indeed, it is a huge portion of everyday activity in many societies. Focusing on only one albeit significant element of that activity, the mouse, means that the description of such complex textual activities as reading, replying, messaging, typing and retyping, composing, is reduced. Language and relationality is erased in an ethical discussion which puts the “click” in the foreground. The function of the click has become simultaneously the motif of instantaneity and of the apparent ethical ephemerality of digital interaction.To say a click is not the same as turning your face to another person is perhaps not too hard to argue. But if so, at the same time it must be acknowledged that “clicking away” is not the same as turning your face away from someone. The click is a function of intention, which has to be seen as just one element of the mediated encounters between people via digital interfaces. Just because the function which allows me to traverse the interface is near-instantaneous, and relies on an embodied movement which is getting more effortless (we now tap, swipe, even look at the interface to create action) does not mean that the textual ends of that function are defined by the same apparent lack of friction. The reading of the click as a somehow ethically hollowed-out function or an a-ethical procedure relies on the notion that online activity is somehow divorced from offline activity. To put this in the context of the initial quotation, my friend will know if I have not read their blog post (or if I disagree with it) when they ask me next time we meet, or when they message me asking what I thought. There are questions here about how people pay attention to other people online, and how friendship is similar-but-different in mediation via and interface. But the answers to these should understand that the click is a surface element, a nexus in which disparate elements temporarily merge: the affordances provided by the interface, the intentions of the person(s) interacting via the interface, and the variety of embodied actions which communicates such intention (typing, looking, navigating and re-navigating, linking, posting, sharing). If the click is to be thought of as an ethical act, it must be considered in the context of the interface before the context of the face-to-face. In other words, it must be viewed as a component of virtual ethics before it is considered a practice for virtue ethics.

I’ve been reading Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technology by Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas. It’s a collection from 2004 which contains a really diverse set of work on technology, politics and society. The piece in it that has really stayed with me, and kept cropping up in my thinking this week, is Carolyn Marvin’s Peaceable Kingdoms and New Information Technologies. Marvin’s main argument is that digital forms of communication don’t have the power to reconfigure borders, or to challenge the basis of institutionalized power, because they are bloodless. Nation-states have always been founded on the sacrifice of blood – war – in order to establish communities. The imagined communities of nationhood, she states, citing Benedict Anderson, need some bond to imagine before they can start imagining, thinking and writing about it. Marvin views the essential catalyst of national community as the letting of blood from the body, the death of citizens in defense of the nation, because it is this which is the foundation of a national bond.

Marvin has written extensively on this concept before (see her and David Ingle’s Blood Sacrifice and The Nation) but here the discussion is focused on the relation of digital forms to the nation state. Marvin focuses on the difference between textuality and embodiment, with the later being constructed as the hallowed face-to-face that is seen as a tangibly different mode of communicating. “At the level of lived existence, social structure is visibly anchored by conventions of proper social distance in face-to-face exchanges between persons of similar or different statuses.” The face is the thing which keeps people together, and also the thing which establishes the “proper” distance of social behaviour. I won’t go into the Face as a theoretical/theological concept here, but certainly it’s at the foundation of Marvin’s argument about nation states – that proximity to blood sacrifice is the embodied situation which makes the imagining of nation-state by the citizen possible:

Nation-states are not simply well-coordinated daydreams of language and information. They are communities of moral obligation whose members’ bodies are committed to mutual common defense[…]
Where connections are attenuated by distance and mediated through texts – in the sprawling industrialized nations where readers of this essay are likely to live – ties of compelling psychological and social power must be generated in the absence of physically intimate bonds that unite members of face-to-face communities.

That “moral obligation” is manifest in contrasting ways: see the UK in these recent weeks after the EU referendum. Hate crimes are forms of extremely reductive “mutual common defense”, based on a crude moral obligation that is about justifying the sacrifice of the nation: You’re not allowed to share in our sacrifice, because it’s impossible that you spill your blood for the nation – because it’s the wrong blood – so fuck off back to your own national sacrificial altar. In reality, it is refugees and stateless peoples who are the sacrificial fodder upon which nation-states subsist.

The second part of the above quotation is what refutes the power of the digital text, the text which is defined by the distances between those who read it and the mediation of the platforms through which it is experienced. There’s an assumption by Marvin, I think, about the efficacy of texts through their sharing, in that the text which is digital can be shared, but such a mechanism doesn’t automatically come with the presence of the face. The giving of a book, or leaflet, or pamphlet, in-person, comes with the face always there.

For Marvin, digital communities can’t challenge the imagined communities of nation-states, because “digital texts are abstracted from the bodies that produce and receive them […] they are endlessly duplicated and effortlessly distributed.” The body, the site of power for the nation state, is “the real treasure of the community”. “Texts can recall stuff” but don’t have “real bodies to back them, as gold backs currency”. Taking Marvin’s argument further, she seems to suggest there is an effortlessness, a lack of friction, in the digital (we have to ask what the nature of that “abstraction” is). I would suggest this is not a lack of embodiment, because all digital acts are first of all embodied acts, but currently could be seen as a lack of the trace or signifier of embodiment? Which means that digital acts lack the ethical weight of the body? My thinking isn’t clear here. I’m just not sure it’s as easy as saying textual/digital = abstract, body/blood = real, but by this I don’t necessarily mean to refute the idea the nation state deals in bodies.

Toward the end of the essay, Marvin suggests that digital networks, or other forms of textuality, might one day challenge the nation-state, but only when there is a path from abstracted digital texts to the body, one which will be established through violence:

The more citizens are strangers, the more dramatic and compelling – the more violent – must be the rituals that elicit their willingness to sacrifice despite (and frequently in defiance of) family, religion, and other body-based affiliations that compete for moral supremacy and have the capacity to derail or destroy national purpose.

I’m not going to think through the above in detail here, because I’m running out of time and this is already a bit long, but Marvin’s thoughts made me think of a recent piece by Aria Dean. It examines memes and blackness, and was published in a new magazine dealing with the nature of digital forms, Real Life. Discussing the bodiless nature of memes, Dean refers to the artist Hannah Black’s comments about modernity and embodiment:

We use words like modern and contemporary to signal changes in the arrangement of meaning of images. But I wonder if we could put more pressure on these apparent novelties if we could situate the present in this long history of circulating bodies.

This circulation of bodies is linked by Dean to the Middle Passage: “From the Middle Passage onward, we have been in circulation — shipped as goods to the new world, circulated throughout the Americas as labor, circulating ourselves as fugitives.”

Memes, though – perhaps the ultimate digital text – are posited in this piece as engines of movement which create a network which is beyond the state: “[t]he meme moves so quickly and unpredictably as to establish a state(lessness?)”. This boundlessness, this metaphysical rejection of the border, means that “[f]or blackness, the meme could be a way of further figuring an existence that spills over the bounds of the body, a homecoming into our homelessness.” You’ll have to go read the piece, but it seems that some digital forms, such as the meme, are no longer as abstracted from the nature of the body, and bodily sacrifice, as might initially be the case.

While zipping up to Lincoln and back last week for What Happens Now, I’ve been getting in a bit of Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 (thank Gari). It’s a book that’s been on my “must get round to reading that” list for months. I’m talking mainly about the second chapter here, although there are some general comments about the work as a whole.

Crary’s main thesis is that the concept of 24/7 is the dominant aspect of present-day capitalism, and that this should be central to critical thought about the control structures of the twenty-first century. It’s an emotional and intelligent polemic, given to poetic and arresting claims: “[a]n illuminated 24/7 world” is one “without shadows” – “the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change.” Crary’s reading is politically-driven and motivated by a desire to emphasize the ideological violence at the heart of a 24/7 world.

The main issues defining contemporary living are contained in the fact that present-day capitalism must ultimately see sleep as an affront to its ideological workings. The 24/7 society is, as it were, always on, and as such temporal boundaries become blurred. It undermines distinctions “between action and repose” creating “a zone of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of experience “. This reminded me of Paul Virilio, and certainly there’s a lot of overlap here in thinking about his concept of “accelerated reality” or “electronic optics”. Beware, says Crary, it is not the tech devices themselves, but the structures of experience which they permit that contain the substance of control:

The idea of technological change as quasi-autonomous, driven by some process of auto-poesis or self-organization, allows many aspects of contemporary social reality to be accepted as necessary, unalterable circumstances, akin to facts of nature [as well as the] [c]oncealment of the most important techniques invented in the last 150 years: the various systems for the management and control of human beings.

Certainly this kind of critical perspective is important during a period where there is an incessant digitizing throughout post-industrial – or in Bernard Stiegler’s words, quoted by Crary, hyperindustrial – society. He emphasizes that digital products are given a constantly regenerating veneer of novelty, in order to promote a form of “self-administration” which ultimately results in the individual becoming an application for processes and controls. There is a lot to nod along to when reading this appraisal of digital products, although we might want to remove the word “exclusive” from the following:

There is an ever closer linking of individual needs with the functional and ideological programs in which each new product is embedded. “Products” are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality.

This does bring us to one of the problems with Crary’s argumentation. He suggests that one of the central problems with writing about new media is that it puts its focus in the wrong place, on the devices and products themselves, “the particular operation and effects of specific new machines or networks”. More important for him are questions about “how the rhythms, speeds, and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption are reshaping experience and perception.” This lapse into generality causes some problems later in the chapter, as well as pointing clearly away from the more convincing political reading of technological structures towards something like Heidegger’s essence of technology.

The main issue is that Crary then makes reference to specific concepts of digital experience – internet pornography, online gambling and video gaming – which arguably require a focus on the specific devices of consumption in order to understand the way their “rhythms” have changed. His dismissive tone when discussing how writing on new media goes out of date doesn’t acknowledge the role that thinking about hardware plays in larger questions about technological structures. Crary focuses, after all, on “products” earlier on in the text, and makes explicit references to the current giants of tech Google and Microsoft throughout.

The obvious counter-argument here is that the “rhythms” and “speeds” of digital consumption cannot be thought separately from the very materiality of the devices that condition such consumption. Crary’s apparent desire for separation turns, then, into a question about form and content, one which he doesn’t satisfactorily address. Perhaps this is part of the bigger picture though, pointing as it does towards a form of difficult liminality, a condition which is related to sleep in the closing chapter of the book.

I would take further issue, though, with the closing comments at the end of Chapter 2, which seem to shift Crary’s otherwise interesting polemic onto a more tired side of the debate about new technologies. There is, it seems to me, a further difficulty in drawing boundaries. After denigrating the “intellectually spurious” work of technophilic writers such as Esther Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte and Kevin Kelly, Crary argues for the kind of anti-technology stance which feels reactionary and unthinking:

Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one’s immediate actual circumstances. It is now a given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human scale communication or exploration of ideas.

This assertion – for it is an assertion – relies on the same logic of the apparently intellectually spurious authors of technophilic persuasion that Crary dismisses. Any interrogation of the rather cloudy noun phrase “human scale communication” leads down the path to a suspiciously safe liberal-humanism. It also relies on the notion that the relationship between “life” and the “digital” is a dualistic one, a perspective convincingly challenged by contemporary writers on tech (see Nathan Jurgenson here). The above is a totalizing statement about online activity which is reductive of the ways in which social media supplements or influences behaviour, as opposed to replacing it. More critically interesting would be to consider the way that activities which don’t take place online are discussed and represented online. Far from the idea that these activities either do or don’t “have an online correlate” a more nuanced and accurate critical perspective would be to view “online” behaviours as working in combination with “offline” behaviours. The line is blurred. We do not find limitation on the inside of the screen and exploration on the outside. Crary here is actually not far from the technophilic writers he calls the “academic watchdogs”, those which he says police views critical of the technopoly. I don’t disagree that pro-tech writing is often lacking in critical reflection, I just don’t think the way to challenge it is to write polemic which does the same.

Although Crary seems to be one of the most politically-engaged and in many ways clear-sighted writers on the subject, here he throws his lot in with Sherry Turkle et al, those other watchdogs of the human subject. As we find later in the text, being against the problems of twenty-first century capitalism means, apparently, being against the entire concept of digitality, because within digital forms “a sociality outside of individual self-interest becomes inexorably depleted, and the interhuman basis of public space is made irrelevant to one’s fantasmic digital insularity.” I fear that Crary’s view of the digital spaces we inhabit is too limited, and the arguments here would be improved by some acknowledgement of the possibilities for digital communities to augment and support unity between individuals. The problem for Crary seems to be that the very boundary he makes firm – between “real life” and the world of digital capitalism – is too rigid.

Having just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, I’m left with the same questions I’ve had when finishing similar books – those slightly pop-culture ones that say “tech bad”. These questions are about ethics: why doesn’t the author fully acknowledge and interrogate the ethical values which serve as the foundation to their arguments about technology? What do they actually mean by the loss of “humanity”?

This is not to say that Lanier doesn’t make some apposite observations about the way that digital technology has developed since the 1980s. The idea of software being ‘locked-in’, fixed in place, and thus shaping the way that human beings behave and relate through digital forms, is an important one to understand, not least because it highlights how certain kinds of information technologies are shaped by capital (it isn’t hard to argue that this is the case for all digital networks – consider the idea of data centres and cloud computing, something which is a footnote for Lanier). In highlighting the idea of software lockdown, he identifies that the ubiquitous software at the heart of personal computing, UNIX, “doesn’t accommodate the rhythms of the body” because it relies on a command line interface – basically an automatic keyboard input, which on hitting the ‘return’ key will trigger an event. This disconnect between the mechanisms of a software that shapes many of the tools that lubricate modern society and the idea of human embodiment or an everyday understanding of presence in time needs further discussion and investigation. We need to better understand the cultural logic that digitality conveys, and how that is used to alter and shape experience. What is less useful is an essentialist humanism, saying that digitality is a one-dimensional thing, reducing some kind of overarching humanity.

The main problem with Lanier is that he much prefers individuals to groups of people. He sees a “reduction” in what it means to be human, due to a loss of what is mystical about human connection and creativity – that is, a challenge to the sovereignty of the individual. His perspective abstracts us from concrete experiences of digital networks and communication. Groups connected by the internet become mobs or dumb crowds, at the expense of the intellectual individual:

Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviours. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.

In this, we can see what really drives his critique of a computerised-ideology, or what he terms cybernetic totalism, is the perceived challenge to liberal-humanism. Viewing humans in terms of computers, or contemplating the possibility of the Singularity, is a challenge to the modernist project of the powerful sovereign individual. While there are obvious concerns to be recorded about the totalizing potential of an anti-human, cloud-based repository for all information, I feel like the focus on the Singularity is misplaced, and masks a political insecurity. While there are people pushing for a new way of thinking about the human being (call it whatever you want) it means the group of human beings who have had the most power, respect and control – Gutenberg white male individuals – see a threat.

This kind of reading might explain why, for Lanier, groups of people, digital communities, are not as important as cultured, intellectual individuals. Early in the text, he contrasts “pack mentality” with “the phenomenon of individual intelligence”. The digital instances of the former mean that “[t]he deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits” – whatever that “deep meaning” might be. The problem with Lanier’s observations is that, while he quite effectively articulates part of the problem of society being shaped, enframed, by technological forces, referring to concrete and useful examples, often he lacks a tangible political engagement with the problems of life as conditioned by digital networks. Take the fact, for instance, that social media networks implicitly sanction violence against women because mechanisms of reporting and dealing with such violence are not a priority of companies making money. There is not a concern with this kind of inequality for Lanier – he makes some points about advertising as the foundation of digital networks, but goes no further than saying that digital networks are capitalist, and lead to monopolies. Instead, he is more concerned with the “reduced” notion of friendship by a system like Facebook, and the somewhat bland concept of people making meaning. I would gently suggest that meaning hasn’t disappeared; that digital networks, even in forms that work from a commodified version of a social face, can facilitate genuine community power that results in tangible action, creation and collaboration. In another example, an early section entitled “How Politics Influences Information Technology” has no politics – Lanier actually identifies a moral rather than a political dilemma about the influence of tech engineers on the structures that “change how you conceive of yourself and the world”.

The closing sentence of the book reveals the Gutenberg ideology that underpins Lanier’s challenge to communities in technological spaces. “A deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us.” Here, a shift in understanding about the way digital networks shape our society is political only in so far as it grants the sovereign individual a version of liberal-humanist “freedom” – freedom to know, to indulge in an adventure, rather than freedom to acknowledge and challenge inequality.

If someone feels the need to write the statement “[o]nly the people were ever meaningful”, they see abstraction where they should see politics.

Selves are constituted in, or by, their answerability before others; they acquire meaning only through intersubjective horizons, horizons which surround textual as well as human encounter.

I’ve been reading Adam Newton’s Narrative Ethics (1995), another important text in modern ethical criticism. I’ve been thinking about this kind of criticism more recently as that which concerns itself explicitly by what it means to read critically . It usually tries to connect literariness to lived experience in some way, and will often have to define what it means by “ethics” in the first place.

Narrative Ethics comes after the Neo-Aristotelian work of critics like Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, and attempts to work from a different meta-ethical foundation, one which faces the text, performing ethics through the act of reading, which involves the dual movement of “resisting” as well as “recognizing” the text, without recourse to “the totalizing pretensions of literary theory”.

To carry out his critical act of facing the text, Newton uses a combination of concepts from Levinas, Cavell and Bakhtin to support what we might call his variation on deconstruction. As you might guess, it becomes rather dense with allusion and is littered with the fragments of quite difficult concepts. There are still moments of real clarity, though, and by putting all of the ingredients in the pot, as it were, Newton has at least tried to rethink how we might conceive of the relationship between reading, writing, criticism and ethics. I’m just not sure it’s ultimately different from a deconstructive position.

Newton’s is at pains to separate his perspective from Paul de Man’s suspended ignorance, claiming that de Man’s ultimate skepticism regarding the capacity of language to provide stable meaning doesn’t account for the potential in reading to perform an ethics, accusing him of a kind of “cowardice” which stops “woefully short”. Narrative ethics “faces” a text, because it acts, whereas deconstruction “stares at” it; “[t]he question, in other words, is whether one names a problem, or substitutes for it the undertaking or assuming or enacting of one.”

Newton’s ethics, then, is defined in a truly Levinasian spirit:

[i]n the special, but by no means unusual, sense I intend it […] “ethics” refers to the radicality and uniqueness of the moral situation itself, a binding claim exercised upon the self by a concrete and singular other, whose moral appeal precedes both decision and understanding.

He also – as the title of his book might suggest – has a thing for narrative texts, especially the novel, although there is an excellent analysis of some short stories, including Henry James’ In The Cage. “Narrative situations” are privileged because they:

create an immediacy and force, framing relations of provocation, call, and response that bind narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text […] prose fiction translates the interactive problematic of ethics into literary forms. Stories, like persons, originate alogically. As ethical performance, in Levinas’ sense, they are concussive: they shock and linger as “traumatisms of astonishment”. [My emphasis]

So if prose fiction “translates” the “interactive problematic”, Newton begins to sound more like Nussbaum than De Man – that literary texts can provide a “laboratory” for ethical encounters. This, perhaps, in spite of his explicit quoting of Levinas, and his desire to posit the critical reading experience as something which begins “alogically”. Certainly Newton’s perspective is not that we “refine” or “enrich” our ethical understanding through reading the right texts, as Nussbaum says, but that it is through understanding the limitations of narrative, of our difference from the text,* that texts effect their ethical force. Reading – in the “ethical drama it rehearses”:

stages a “command performance,” the legislative power here belonging not to author or to text but to the critical and responsive act. The very act of reading, in other words, like prayer or casual looking, permits things to happen.

Although Newton does state that the “structure of fiction” is “not the structure of the personal encounter”, there is a sense that the critic attempts to walk a tightrope between different influences, rather than wholly embracing one or the other. This is perhaps summed up by a further attempt to clarify the distinction between literature and persons, between text and face, one which leaves us wondering which camp Newton is really in:

The profoundest meaning of narrative ethics, then, may be just this sheer fact of limit, of separateness, of boundary. It engages us, it places claims upon us, not exactly as life and persons do, but similarly, and with similar ethical consequences.

Although I do think the idea of texts demonstrating limits is important (see Butler in this previous post) the rest feels a bit limp. The “profoundest meaning” of Narrative Ethics is an idea that, in the end, is “not exactly” but “similar to” life. We probably needn’t have read that far to understand that literary texts are “similar to life”. This lack of critical thrust might be down to an ambiguity at the heart of the project, which “hope[d] to invest ethics with the kind of interpretive force exercised by the sharpest of contemporary ideological modes of literary analysis.” This puzzled me initially. Is it that Newton tries to “do” ethics without “doing” ideology? Or by suggesting that ideology doesn’t do ethics correctly? Although the statement does, I think, get at one of the problems of ethical criticism, the sense that it’s almost always too concerned with itself. I keep feeling that ethical critics could be more concerned with saying something that returns the import of the literary text to the world in which it was produced – to do politics rather than talking about it. There is an excellent discussion of the role of blackness in Stephen Crane, for instance, using Levinas’s concept of face as skin. Newton makes insightful and intelligent comment in his readings. It made me wonder – I’m not sure of the import of distinguishing between ideological – or the political – and the ethical. Are critics able to make politically prescient comments about texts that relate to the political and ethical conflicts we recognise as important? Or do we always have to worry about our system of critique over and above that?

When we decide to do ethico-politics is when critics start saying things that matter, that are not just “similar to” but are directly the experience of life and persons. This, to me, is what constitutes the “response” to the textual “call” of alterity that Newton ultimately posits:

ethically poised philosophy probably serves literature best […] when it allows texts first to speak, to tell their whole stories, before it responds. Such a response needs tactfully to mediate between knowledge and silence, between bestowing a critical surplus that literature cannot provide itself and simply registering the fact of literature’s alterity […] an equilibrium of call and response, not blindness and insight.

*Newton does admit the similarities to Derrida later in the work. His mode of “[e]thical self-understanding” of texts “begin[s] to look not unlike differance” . He says that this “cannot help surfacing in readings which attempt to correlate Levinasian concepts with a theory of literary interpretation.”

Over the last two days I’ve been looking at Jeffrey Karnicky’s Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture (2007). It’s a work of criticism which has irritated me, but that’s probably more my own fault than Karnicky’s.

First of all, the title promises some kind of engagement with “modern culture”. But what this really means in this instance is “postmodern literary culture” or “classroom culture”. David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Susan Daitch and Irvine Welsh are all presented as postmodern writers worthy of Karnicky’s ethical criticism, but the choices seem disparate, and indicative of a general (perhaps designed) lack of cohesion surrounding Karnicky’s project here.

The readings themselves are original and compelling, using each text to consider different concepts of reading and writing, meaning that the critical method is not using terms set by the critic, necessarily, but by the text themselves. This demonstrates Karnicky’s commitment to the singularity of the reading experience, something that Derek Attridge rather got to first in his book The Singularity of Literature (2004).

Not to say this isn’t all well and good. We have a range of interesting texts, read in a way which is keenly aware of the boundaries and pitfalls of literary criticism. Karnicky bases his philosophy of reading on a combination of Deleuze, Guttari and Blanchot, creating a kind of collage about how to read ethically, how to defeat the totalizing perspective of literary criticism whilst doing literary criticism.

The main problem I have is that the end result of Karnicky’s philosophy of reading is politically impotent, and actually I think reinscribes an all-powerful literariness, rather than breaking out of the confines of the debates around postmodernism which he rails against. At the start of the work, he sensibly recasts the question around reading:

Rather than endless debate over what should be read, a focus on reading asks what I would call a more important question: How does the practice of reading create actual effects in the world? […] The works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Maurice Blanchot can point to other ways of formulating the solitary encounter between literature and life that happens with every act of reading.

But the “actual” effects we get to by the end are rather vague and, it seems, supportive of the kind of subjectivity which is being railed against through the use of a thinker like Deleuze. Here’s a flavour of the conclusion, which uses the image of the classroom as a way to articulate the effects of ethical reading:

for me, teaching an ethics of reading involves a seemingly paradoxical double movement: cultivating a space of fascination cut off from the wider world while at the same time arguing that literature, particularly contemporary literature, is relevant to everyday life […] Fiction, in a sense, provides a critical distance from the rest of the world […] [but] must return to the world and must always bring something with it.

Fascination with the literary work is one of the poles which criticism reaches, existing between this and “everyday life”. The use of the term fascination in any critical endeavour – even on focusing on the singularity of the experience of reading literature – seems to me to be depowering, a removal of agency – literary works are fascinating, and part of being a good reader is be bewitched by the text. If we’ve got the time and inclination to be bewitched, then yeah, sure. But I’m not sure that doesn’t undermine those modes of reading which would address those who are under-represented, marginalized in the literary academy. The “return to the world” which Karnicky posits as a path for thinking about fiction doesn’t save us from this apparent lack of political understanding:

An ethical reading practice will not necessarily provide a student with a “truth” about the world, but it might encourage students to engage other ways of living, other logics that can be lived by […] An ethical reading practice must strive to make the goalless space of literature relevant to a wider world […] reading without a goal of saying what a text means is a key component of an ethics of reading.

The pale “encouragement” of students to “engage other ways of living”, “other logics”, feels to me like a very weak version of respect for alterity. We are to be fascinated by the literary work, and then make the “goalless” space of literature relevant. There is no firm acknowledgement that even if literature is goalless, it is still an integral part of living life – and that the latter is surely not goalless, but politically prescient. To be fascinated by one’s own life is perhaps a motto for the liberal-humanist subject. It all feels like it stops short of anything significant – but perhaps I’m betraying my recent reading of Levinas here.

While, as Karnicky admits, “the inability to construct a basic model or to make a general claim about how an ethics of reading works can be considered a key component of an ethics of reading”, it seems that his books demonstrates how we cannot escape the need to establish a model, or at least resort to some grounding, universalizing metaphors, when describing our methods of reading and their effects. What is interesting here is the actual criticism borne out by Karnicky’s approach is good work, but the framework surrounding it feels collaged, smoothed over, so that the only appearance of the “wider world” is through “other logics”, glanced at but not addressed.

I’m starting to plan my first chapter – equal parts scary and exciting, like a roller coaster, or eating a live crab. This means I have to work out how my reading(s) of Levinas fits with my way of approaching novels – or, at least, the I think one can productively and usefully read and critique twenty-first century American fiction, works that attempt to make sense of the digital condition of language.

Technology is the main *thing* I’m interested in in contemporary fiction, but before I get to that, it’s important to consider the status of literary criticism as a discipline. If I want to use Levinas to inform a reading of texts, then I need to engage critically and actively with the recent history of ethical criticism (for a brief primer about this, see the text from my talk from earlier on this year, or, you know, someone much more experienced.)

To this end, I’ve recently read Dorothy J Hale’s consummate paper Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel. Hale writes regarding the nature of current ethical criticism, and the different ways that critics attempt to posit the idea that literature has some form of ethical value. She makes clear that this isn’t only about deciding what ethics is, but about deciding what the nature of literature is:

For many post-structuralist literary critics, the return to ethics is not just the attempt to recuperate the agency of the individual reader or author for positive political action but also an attempt to theorize for our contemporary moment the positive social value of literature and literary study.

What one means by “ethics” in this context rather depends on who you’re talking to. If you were talking to me, I’d suggest that literature helps us to understand ethics in a Levinasian sense. That is, Literature doesn’t provide us with moral rules or codes, and, indeed, might not even get anywhere near a representation of an ideal, or a good life. It’s not about learning directly from literature about how to act morally – that’s not really how we read, understand and talk about books. What I mean by a Levinasian sense here, is that literary works can calibrate our awareness of the other – they can challenge or question our understanding of ourselves, and remind us of the presence of the Other. (The problem with this, I think, is that in order to understand this challenge, we often have to resort to a literary critical language, or at least have a sense of the methods we use in reading a literary work – that’s where literary criticism comes in.)

Hale put me in mind of Levinas a lot while I was reading her articles, but she explicitly separates herself from critics like Newton who use Levinas to inform a theory of narrative ethics. In this piece, Hale outlines what ethics means for a number of writers, as well as for ethical critics of the novel – Eliot, Dickens and Trilling sit alongside Nussbaum, Harper and Spivak – but ultimately sees similarities in each ethical approach , to do with the centrality of the novel (as opposed to, say, poetry) and “agreement about the novel’s function as an agent of the reader’s ethical education”. Hale suggests that ethical critics working today are concerned with the reader as a “self-binding” figure – that is, a reader who is able to embrace and respect the alterity of the text through their commitment to limiting their powers of reading, remaining aware both as their place as judge (i.e. able to create the text) and of their limitations as a reader in being able to make ethical judgments about a text.

Through detailed reference to the arguments of Judith Butler (specifically Butler’s reading of Henry James’ Washington Square), Hale identifies the common concept of ethical criticism as centred around understanding the limitations of reading. That, if we read, we experience what it is like to have limited ethical powers, to be put into a position of not having the clarity of a moral code or set of ethical values. She articulates this as the peculiar power of the novel, that, “[t]he novel is produced as the most independent, the most elastic, the most prodigious of literary forms precisely because it does not solve in advance the problem of its own regulation.” She sums up her perspective on 21st century ethics thus:

what distinguishes this new theory of ethical choice from an older theory of the autonomous liberal subject is the self-consciously unverifiable status of the alterity that the ethical subject seeks to produce—an unverifiability that retains the post-structuralist’s skepticism about knowledge as a tool of hegemony while bestowing upon epistemological uncertainty a positive ethical content.

There are questions about what we mean by an ethical subject – and whether those ethical subjects are also literary critics – but certainly here there is a sense that reading informs an ethics that is defined by limits, by self-abnegation, rather than a self positing a right or wrong.

“How do you know it’s me?” deadpanned the author when asked during a Q&A what his motivations for coming to Paris were. Part of his reason for attending was the coming launch of his new novel, Zero K. DeLillo certainly didn’t miss a chance to discuss the new novel, and who could blame him; his extremely captive audience were all going to go and get his new book, and write new papers and chapters about it. This was part-conference, part-convention, part-mini literary festival.

He followed up the gag with an admission that the whole experience was extremely gratifying for him, as we might expect, but at no point did the author seem arrogant or aloof. The conference was excellent (in my limited experience, I’ve not known such a consistently high standard of presentations) but, especially when Delillo was in the building, there was a tangible awareness of the gap between the language of the writer and the language of academics. What were we doing asking questions of the academics, when the author was right there? Why don’t we just ask him? The two identities of literary critics were right there in front of us – the knowledgeable writer of arguments about the meanings of literary texts and the geek who loves what the writer has done, how they have changed their lives. It was as though the debates about a post-theory critical atmosphere, ethical criticism and affective reading were being practically tested in front of us. You’re here because you write professionally about these works,but you’re also here because you love the words this guy writes.

And I think there’s something valuable in this. Although there were points when the writer seemed rather swamped by the attention given to him by so many prominent academics, it was also refreshing to see said academics acting just like any other fan would – queuing up to get their books signed, showing that the effect of this author’s work was not one that only manifested in scholarly work. Indeed, it showed more than ever that scholarly work stems from utter enthusiasm. It also can’t have done any harm to the perspective of established DeLillo scholars to see the bubble of the academic conference pre-emptively burst in this way, connecting, sometimes literally through a dialogue with the author, work in the academy to the reality of the text outside in the rest of society (the conference was open to members of the public – although I’m yet to find out what the proportion of academic/public attendees was).

The sheer range of material and methods of reading covered over the three days was impressive, from the poetics of nuclear bombs to Delillo’s language as analogous to pure mathematics. The first keynote, delivered with charm, wit and care by Michael Naas, focused on the notion of contraband – or rather, modes of stylistic contraband – in DeLillo’s work. The identification of a DeLillian idiolect was well-received, with Naas listing those turns of phrase that typify DeLillo’s style: the “linguistic shrapnel” of names, the lists, the “Whatever that means” after apparently opaque fragments of sentences.

There was a noticeable focus on the later fiction, call it either post-millennial or post-9/11 (or even post 1997’s Underworld), but the organisers had obviously understood the need to cover a wide-range of works; well-structured papers examining earlier novels like Ratner’s Star or Mao II gave some important insights into the place of these novels in the orbiting mass of DeLillo’s ideas. The final day was made up of papers and discussion concerning Falling Man (2007), with another excellent keynote, this time from Professor Peter Boxall, focusing on the use of tautology in DeLillo’s late style. Tautology in DeLillo, Boxall suggested, worked along a different logic to how analytical philosophy might understand it – that the “collapsing of language” in a tautological structure demonstrated a “growing ahistoricism”, a way of addressing the “diminished historical conditions of the new millennium”. Later, there was a Q&A for Sorbonne students studying the text, which included a reading from the author. The sense of reverence was palpable for a figure whose commitment to writing the counter-narrative to terrorism has such resonance in the recent past of Paris. One of the most revealing moments of came when DeLillo discussed the role of 9/11 in his life and his work: “In some ways” he said, “ [9/11] defined the rest of my life up until this point.” It might be said that it partly defined the conference, with the terms “organic shrapnel” and “late style” recurring like leitmotif throughout the three days.

When asked the last question, about why he came to the conference, DeLillo – in his own words, the “kid from the Bronx” – was self-deprecating, extremely grateful. “I’m not sure it’s real” he said. It was a fitting phrase for the central concern of the conference itself, an event for academics, but also for those whose lives Don DeLillo has changed; an event which examined the way his works attempt to comprehend reality, how we put together the day-to-day with the idea of history. Whatever that means.

This is the text of a short talk I gave at Critical Studies Research Group Work In-Progress session on 26th January 2016.

The central question of my work currently is “to what extent can reading contemporary fiction help us to understand ethical questions surrounding the human being and technology?”. It is a question which is concerned with the ethics of digital interaction and the technological object as represented in contemporary fiction, focused on a corpus of American writers, working between 2007 and 2014. Jenni Egan, Joshua Ferris, William Gibson, Dave Eggers, Tao Lin and Ben Lerner.

What I intend to do today is give a brief outline of the concept of ethical criticism, with a focus on the approach of moral philosopher/ethical critic Martha Nussbaum. Then explain some of the challenges to this approach from literary and cultural critic Robert Eaglestone. This will make reference to the thought of Emmaneul Levinas. At which point I’ll address how my project looks to develop an ethical critical approach, in order to examine the ethics of technology in contemporary American fiction.

Put very basically, ethical criticism is a form of reading which assumes a text – more often than not, a narrative, literary text – can help us to understand what it means to be a human being, and that this should be the focus of how we responsibly read as critics. We can access this understanding through carefully close reading the surface of the text, as opposed to seeing the most significant or important elements of the text as hidden or beneath the surface . An ethical critic does not treat the text as a “suspicious” object, but as something which is “open”, or an example of “alterity” with which to be engaged. A text, has a message that should be “done justice to” by the critic. It’s a perspective which has undergone a resurgence in last thirty years or so, and can be seen as a reaction to a perceived lack of ethical responsibility in the approaches of critical theory. This has seen the practice of different forms of criticism labelled “ethical”, for instance, humanist, deconstructive, or most recently narrative ethics.

This is referred to as ”turn to ethics” in literary criticism can be clearly seen today in the numerous critics calling themselves ethical or referring to the ethics of an author or text. It’s present too at undergraduate level: a 2013 undergraduate research seminar at University of California, Berkeley, focused on the debate between what it referred to as “suspicious” and “surface” reading, the latter being described as a reading practice that is willing to look at rather than through surfaces. The description quotes Rita Felski, Professor of English at University of Virginia, who has written at length about the practice of reading in the academy, that the job of the literary critic is to “respect rather than reject what is in plain view,”

I will give here the full quotation from Felski’s book Uses of Literature (2008), to help frame the contemporary ethical critic’s project overall:

…We are called on to honor our implication and involvement in the words we read, rather than serving as shame-faced bystanders to our own aesthetic response. Here my argument links up with a recent ethical turn in literary studies, an exhortation to look at, rather than through, the literary work, to attend to the act of saying rather than only the substance of what is said. [that’s a reference to Levinas, which we’ll get to later]. The act of reading enacts an ethics and a politics in its own right, rather than being a displacement of something more essential that is taking place elsewhere […]the discourse of [literary] value is neither intrinsic to the object nor forged single-handedly by the subject, but arises out of a complex interplay between institutional structures, interpretive communities, and the idiosyncrasies of individual taste.

Ethical criticism intersects with philosophy of ethics, and I’ll here give a brief sense of the philosophical element of this, before moving on to Nussbaum, Eaglestone and Levinas. We begin with Bernard William’s invocation of the Socrates question “how should I live?” as the basis for any ethical inquiry, in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, published in 1985. Whatever version of ethical criticism we are talking about, this question, is somewhere near the centre of its purposes, in some form.

Both Williams and Alisdair MacIntyre contend that our understanding of what it means to be a human being, to live ethically, adhering to a relevant moral code, is conditioned by what is now an outdated moral language – that the complexity of contemporary society is not adequately accommodated by the moral language relied on by the tradition of moral philosophy. Williams, for instance, suggests that we should understand ethical concepts as “thick”, that is being both simultaneously descriptive and evaluative (i.e. courage). MacIntyre, working from a Neo-Aristotelian foundation of the good being located in social action and human relations, suggests that it is through social “practices” that we understand how best to live. Social relations and situations are the currency of our ethical understanding – not concepts reducible to big abstract nouns like “justice”, “divinity”, or even “good”. This is summed up by MacIntyre’s focus on the single unit of that currency: “Conversation” he says “is the form of human transactions in general […] conversations in particular and human action in general” are “enacted narratives.”

This extremely brief outline of some of the important ideas surrounding contemporary morality points towards what has been called the “turn to narrative” in the philosophy of ethics (see Galen Strawson (2004), Martin Warner (2009), Michael Eskin (2004)). So there is a double turn, of moral philosophy to the concept of narrative and of literary criticism to reading texts as ethical documents.

Martha Nussbaum is a major proponent of a humanist form of ethical criticism, a seminal moment of which came with the special edition of the journal New Literary History in 1983, edited by Ralph Cohen. Nussbaum’s paper entitled ‘Flawed Crystals’ on Henry James’ The Golden Bowl was published there, which carried out a reading of the relationships between characters undergoing ethical conflicts: Maggie’s desire to marry her husband the prince, balanced with her need not to abandon her father; her desire to maintain a coherent friendship and relationship with Charlotte, who is having an affair with her husband the Prince.

Writing in a slightly later essay from 1987, Nussbaum sees “an absence, from literary theory, of the organizing questions of moral philosophy, and of moral philosophy’s sense of urgency about these questions”. She turns to a narrow canon of narrative literary texts, on the premise that they can present unique forms of moral confrontation and resolution, drawing mainly on the novels of Henry James, although later looks at Beckett and Greek Tragedy. For the moral philosopher Nussbaum, literary texts, coupled with the clarifying voice of the ethical critic, can provide an account of social relations and complex situations, one which helps us to understand ethical conflicts in a way which is far more relevant to living than the philosophical text: “the very qualities that make novels so unlike dogmatic abstract treatises are, for us, the source of their philosophical interest.” Reading a text enriches our understanding of a particular ethical conflict, by giving us access to the thoughts and feelings of a character with whom the reader aligns. The aim of the critic, then, should be to “connect [..] observations [about the text] to an evolving conception of […] the sense of life it expresses.” In other words, the text can tell us about how to live our lives – how to consider ethical decisions, what kind of human being it is possible to be – in a way that abstract moral philosophising can’t. Nussbaum’s is a Neo-Aristotelian ethics, taking the question “what is the good life for a human being?” as its main focus, to look at and comment on the “moral imagination” of the characters a writer like Henry James presents us with. The novel “gestures toward the limits of ethical consciousness” through its narrative mode and stylistic choices.

There is something attractive about the clarity of Nussbaum’s project – that is, asking what sense of life a text provides us with, and casting light on that through a mechanism of close reading. We may think of it as what we’ve always done with literary texts – at school, at sixth form, in undergraduate literature essays. It is, at heart, a humanist approach. As such, it comes with some significant problems, especially for the critic of contemporary texts. Firstly, let us recall Rita Felski – “[t]he act of reading enacts an ethics and a politics in its own right”. Any ethical critic’s project purporting to attend to the surface of a text, to the ethical worlds we find there, privileges the ethical perspective of some authors over others. Nussbaum does acknowledge –

it is reasonable to suppose that the full and precise investigation of such issues would require turning, as well, to texts from other origins […] we will need to maintain as much self-consciousness as possible about our method and our implicit ends, asking what evaluative content they themselves express.

The main problem with an approach like Nussbaum’s, which looks to focus on “the shape of the sentences themselves, by images and cadences and pauses themselves, by the forms of the traditional genres, by narrativity, themselves” – the surfaces of the text – is one of taking too much for granted, in terms of seeing the text as something that reliably reflects situations of ethical conflict and anxiety, and in assuming that a text can reliably mean in a way that is fixed and ready to be turned into ethical commentary by just the right literary-critic-cum-philosopher.

Robert Eaglestone in Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (1998) challenges Nussbaum’s very practice of reading. Eaglestone’s perspective is that critical theory doesn’t eschew ethics, but instead is essentially ethical in the way that it looks to demonstrate the ideological structures which shape human communication. He suggests that Nussbaum’s reading of texts like The Golden Bowl lacks an awareness of the “text as language”. For example, her reading of a character interaction in The Golden Bowl assumes that a particular event happens in one way, that two character definitely commit an act of adultery, when the text is unclear about this event. Eaglestone suggests that Nussbaum appears not to allow for the indeterminacy of meanings within a text and takes for granted a stable narrative truth. (Eaglestone here refers to J. Hillis Miller’s deconstructive ethics of reading.)

So how do we read the ‘surface’ of a text, but without undermining the multiplicity of a text? This leads us to a strand of ethical criticism which can be labelled post-structuralist, one that is influenced by the thought of Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Eaglestone uses Levinas’s ideas to elaborate on the nature of criticism which maintains an awareness of the indeterminacy of the text. He states that ethical criticism must understand its responsibility as a temporary “interruption” rather than a fixed final word, in an echo of Levinas’ conception of the “saying” and the “said”.

To carry out criticism in light of a Levinasian ethical appeal is to engage in, or remain aware of, the process of “saying”, over the “said” – that is, the idea of communicating with an Other, interrupting a fixed or totalizing idea, rather than focusing on the totality of identifiable meaning. It involves viewing the literary text as a version of the Other, to be read responsibly, and with an awareness that readings constantly shift and change. Garber et al articulate this influence on ethical criticism in The Turn to Ethics as “a process of formulation and self-questioning that continually rearticulates boundaries, norms, selves and ‘others.’” (See also, Butler in Garber et. al, 2000).
How to proceed, then, in light of this “double turn” (Eskin, 2004) in philosophy and literature? How might a contemporary critic do justice to Levinas’s appeal in their way of reading? My project looks to produce ethical readings of a corpus of American novels, examining the ways they represent the human within digital technology, reading them in light of Levinas’s appeal toward ‘saying’ – of how criticism should not fix an ethics, but interrupt.

I see the novels in the recent part of the twenty-first century helping to articulate a new ethical-critical viewpoint, helping to understand a new ethical environment that has been brought about by the development of Web 2.0 digital communication, where social relations are in-part characterised by an absence of face, instantaneous messaging means that people are permanently connected and accessible, and embodied action is constantly represented symbolically as virtual action. By looking at the ethics of technology, or as I have been concerned recently, the phenomenology of the technological object, we can better understand too the political dimensions of digital interaction and behaviour.

This follows Eaglestone’s appeal regarding the practice of literary studies that “criticism in the future must embrace new questions, and only by doing so can it maintain its necessary commitment to the ethical – only then can it be ethical criticism.” The project will thus contribute an ethical reading, focused on the “new questions”. I will look at how the following questions are addressed by this corpus of novels:

What do we mean when we say we are losing “genuine” human connection when conversations are mediated through digital forms?

How is the traditional conception of a liberal-humanist subject being shaped and altered by digital structures?

In what ways are digital devices altering our understanding of conversations and social relationships?

How can critique of this help to highlight broader ethical and political concerns?

The wider and more challenging objections to what I see as an imperative to read the digital are important if the inquiry is to be aware enough to make a valuable comment on the changing nature of the human. For instance:

What biases are evident in a reading that privileges digital culture?

Do such readings lean towards a political impotence or a privileging of Western cultural norms?

Is any reading of digital structures in literature doomed to be a reading of an isolated self, behind a screen, rather than a new way of thinking about intersubjectivity and the Other?

I’d like to finish by quoting one of the writer’s I’m currently interested in, Tao Lin, who in 2011 contributed his own perspective on what the contemporary novel is, and the ethical knowledge he sees as part of its remit. He emphasises first of all the importance in focusing, directly, on what is happening now, and secondly on another set of questions, ones which echo a Levinasian preoccupation with the Other, and with a constant saying:

I currently feel most interested in reading/writing novels that aren’t improvements on or innovations of other novels. I want to view each potential novel as already definitively and unavoidably unique, improvable only in comparison to itself and then only from its creator’s singular perspective. I want to learn about another human’s unique experience from reports they’ve made themselves […] I do, sometimes–rarely, I think–want to know, “What do you think other people are going to be thinking about in 20 years?” or “How do you feel humankind, generally, is going to feel like in 50 or 100 years?” But mostly I want to know, “What are you thinking about?” and “How do you feel?”

It is perhaps, in some form, these final two questions which the ethical critic asks, first of the text, then perhaps of the author, then perhaps of the reader themselves. It is an openness of critical thought that fits with the nature of contemporary study, a discipline that is constantly shifting, altering and changing – a constant need to be interrupting our ethical understanding with different forms of saying.